Category Archives: Sport

How Hope Powell became a football legend: ‘I’m not afraid of anybody’

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She was kicked off her school team for being a girl – then played for her country and became manager of the women’s team at 31. She discusses how she helped put women’s football firmly on the map

When Hope Powell reminisces about the childhood that she spent scurrying across the streets of south London, she thinks of football. Perhaps that is no surprise: over the past 40 years, it has given her a career of firsts – after a trophy-laden playing career, she became England’s first female coach, first Black coach and youngest coach. Today, the 54-year-old is the manager of Brighton in the rapidly growing Women’s Super League (WSL).

Over the course of Powell’s career, the women’s game has evolved beyond recognition. Her football education began in the late 70s, just a few years after the Football Association lifted its ban on women’s football, in 1971. She idolised Kevin Keegan and Ray Wilkins, but had no female players to look up to. She and her brothers would knock on the doors of their friends’ houses, then take to the football cages on her council estate for games of rush goalie to 3-a-side.

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England hit with stadium fan ban for Wembley disorder

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  • Uefa rules on ugly scenes at Euro 2020 final in July
  • No England fans to be allowed at Nations League game

England will be forced to play behind closed doors at Wembley after the Football Association was punished for a “lack of order and discipline” in and around the national stadium during the Euro 2020 final.

Alongside a two-match crowd ban, with the second suspended for a probationary period of two years, Uefa ordered the Football Association to pay a fine of €100,000 (£84,500). The ban will come into effect on England’s next competitive Uefa fixture, which is set to be the opening home game of their 2022-23 Nations League campaign.

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‘I was born a fighter’: the champion boxer changing young lives in Zimbabwe

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Boxing helped prizefighter Arifonso Zvenyika overcome real hardship. Now he teaches the sport he loves to aspiring fighters in a Harare ghetto

Beneath a corrugated iron roof in the crowded Harare suburb of Mbare, a group of boys darts back and forth across a smooth concrete floor, firing a series of rapid punches into the air.

A wiry older man, dressed in low-slung tracksuit bottoms and flip-flops, watches their moves, encouraging them to “Jab! Jab! Jab!”.

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Revealed: Newcastle chairman’s links to Saudi ‘anti-corruption’ drive

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Court documents shed new light on Yasir al-Rumayyan’s relationship with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman

Yasir al-Rumayyan, the new non-executive chairman of Newcastle United, was involved in a controversial “anti-corruption” campaign in Saudi Arabia that included the transfer of assets on behalf of the crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.

Details of Rumayyan’s role – including the transfer of a charter jet company to the Public Investment Fund (PIF), where he serves as governor – are contained in court documents that shed light on his relationship with Prince Mohammed.

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Police arrest Agnes Tirop’s husband in connection with athlete’s death

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  • Olympic 5,000m runner found with stab wounds to neck
  • ‘We have main suspect in custody,’ say Kenyan police

Kenyan police say they have arrested the husband of the distance runner Agnes Tirop, a two-times world championship bronze medallist who was found dead at her home.

The 25-year-old Tirop, who represented Kenya in the 5,000 metres at the Tokyo Olympics, was stabbed in the neck with a knife. Police said on Thursday they had arrested Emmanuel Rotich in the coastal city of Mombasa, hours after pleading with him to surrender.

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‘People shunned me like hot lava’: the runner who raised his fist and risked his life

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At the 1968 Olympics, Tommie Smith, winner of the men’s 200 metres, stood on the podium and lifted his hand to protest racism. That moment would end his running career – and shake the world

Tommie Smith still gets chills when he hears the opening bars of The Star Spangled Banner. It takes him right back to that night in October 1968 when he stood on the Olympic podium in Mexico City, wearing his gold medal, and made the raised-fist salute that has defined his life. “It’s kind of a push, when I hear ‘dum, da-dum’,” he says, singing the opening notes of the United States national anthem. “Because that’s the first three notes I heard in Mexico, then my head went down, and I saw no more of it until the last note.”

While the anthem played, all that was going through Smith’s head, he says, was “prayer and pain”. Pain because he had picked up a thigh injury that day on the way to winning the 200m final (he still set a world record). And prayer because Smith was not just putting his career on the line – he was risking his life. There was a real possibility that somebody in the stadium might try to shoot him or his team-mate John Carlos, who was making the salute beside him after winning bronze. In the months leading up to the Olympics, he had been receiving death threats. Two weeks before, Mexican police had fired into a crowd of student protesters, killing as many as 300 people. Martin Luther King had been assassinated just six months earlier. So Smith fully expected that the last thing he would hear, halfway through The Star Spangled Banner, would be a gunshot. “So when I hear that ‘dum, da-dum’, I get chills,” he says. “I got chills then when I sang it,” he laughs, holding out his arms to show the hairs standing on end.

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Australian Chloë McCardel sets world record for most swims across the English Channel – video

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Chloë McCardel finally achieved her dream of crossing the English Channel more times than anyone else. The 36-year-old Australian completed her 44th crossing a little after 2pm BST, eclipsing the previous record held by British swimmer Alison Streeter. ‘I’m buzzing right now, I feel like I could go again and swim the channel again tomorrow, although that's not a very good idea’, she said. After starting in the dead of night at Shakespeare Beach at Dover, she touched land at Wissant Beach on the French side, before returning to her support boat to celebrate

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Agnes Tirop: world record holder found dead as Kenya police seek husband

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  • ‘Kenya has lost a jewel,’ says African nation’s athletics body
  • Tirop smashed the 10km women-only world record last month

One of Kenya’s leading athletes, Agnes Tirop, has been found stabbed to death at her home in Iten, with police treating her husband as a suspect. The 25-year-old athlete, who broke the women-only 10,000m road record last month and also won bronze medals at the 2017 and 2019 world championships, was discovered by police on Wednesday after being reported missing by her father.

Tom Makori, the head of police for the area, confirmed that Tirop’s husband was a suspect after going missing. “When [police] got in the house, they found Tirop on the bed and there was a pool of blood on the floor,” he said. “They saw she had been stabbed in the neck, which led us to believe it was a knife wound, and we believe that is what caused her death.

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Men in tights: World Rugby law change allows male players to wear leggings

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  • Previously only women permitted to wear leggings during games
  • Amendment implemented on ‘welfare and accessibility grounds’

Skinned knees could soon be a thing of the past in rugby union after the sport’s governing body amended its laws to allow players at all levels to wear tights or leggings during games.

Law Four of the sport, which covers players’ clothing, previously only permitted women to wear “cotton blend tights or leggings, with single inside seam under their shorts and socks”, but has now been extended to all participants with immediate effect, World Rugby said.

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The Saudi takeover of Newcastle United is a symptom of England’s political failures | David Goldblatt

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We shouldn’t single out football fans: the country has long since made its peace with the power of capital, whatever its origins

Football, no longer merely the national game, is England’s political theatre. The way in which the spasm of fan protest stopped the European Super League in its tracks in April, and which the prime minister erroneously claimed as his own victory, spoke to both a residual – if often dormant – public sense of justice and communitarianism, and the shamelessness of our snake-skinned political conversation. The open conflict between the England men’s team, the Conservative government and a section of the England fanbase over taking the knee at Euro 2020 was a battle over who gets to define the terms of our debate over structural racism. Now, the long anticipated sale of Newcastle United to Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund points to England’s practically and morally diminished place in the world, and the roads that have taken us there.

The crown prince of Saudi Arabia is not the first politician to take an interest in Newcastle United. In the early 1990s, Tony Blair, then leader of the opposition, was busy burnishing his local credentials by declaring his fidelity to the team, decrying Andy Cole’s transfer to Manchester United in the Sun, and playing keepy-uppy with Kevin Keegan. Like Blair, Newcastle United were the coming thing. After four decades without a trophy, but now under the new ownership of Sir John Hall, both a Thatcherite property developer and an advocate for regional government and regeneration in the north-east, Keegan’s Newcastle were challenging for the Premiership title and playing fabulous football to raging full houses. In 1996 Alan Shearer arrived, on a then recored transfer fee, and declared to a delirious crowd that he was still “the son of a sheet-metal worker”. One could have been forgiven for thinking that, after the hammer blows of 17 years of Thatcherism, there was hope for an English working class and regional revival.

David Goldblatt is the author of The Ball is Round: A Global History of Football and The Game of Our Lives

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Nevada judge recommends dismissal of Cristiano Ronaldo rape case

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  • Case goes back to allegation of assault in 2009
  • Las Vegas judge says legal team used stolen documents

A magistrate judge in Nevada has sided with Cristiano Ronaldo’s lawyers against a woman who sued the footballer after saying he raped her in Las Vegas in 2009.

In a scathing recommendation to the judge hearing the case, magistrate judge Daniel Albregts on Wednesday blamed Kathryn Mayorga’s attorney, Leslie Mark Stovall, for basing the case on leaked and stolen documents that Albregts said were privileged communications between Ronaldo and his lawyers.

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Saudi-backed Newcastle takeover as much about status as sportswashing

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Riyadh will hope acquisition can not only improve kingdom’s image but also serve as a highly conspicuous display of wealth

From heavyweight boxing to horse racing, from wrestling events to a grand prix; Saudi Arabia’s association with sport has become an integral, and contentious, part of its efforts to rebrand.

But its latest play – taking a majority stake in Newcastle United Football Club – is the kingdom’s boldest move yet, placing it firmly on the world’s sporting stage, and squarely in the crosshairs of its critics.

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Tom Daley on love, grief and health: ‘It was hammered into me that I needed to lose weight’

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Fresh from winning gold in Tokyo, the diver answers readers’ questions on everything from gay role models to his passion for knitting and the secrets of his success

Tom Daley, Britain’s most decorated diver, grew up in the spotlight. He was 14 when he made a splash at his first Olympics, in 2008, and at 15 he became a world champion. This year in Tokyo, at his fourth Games, he finally won a longed-for gold, with his synchronised diving partner, Matty Lee. In 2013, Daley came out – a rarity among professional sportspeople – and he has become a campaigner for LGBTQ+ rights. Now 27, he is married to the screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, with whom he has a three-year-old son.

In a new autobiography, he describes struggles with injury, debilitating anxiety and coping with the death of his father, his biggest champion. Here, one of Britain’s best-loved athletes gamely answers questions from our writer and Guardian readers on all of the above, as well as his other great passion: knitting.

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Troy Deeney: ‘I still see two therapists – I’m getting into the nitty-gritty now’

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The Birmingham striker discusses his traumatised past, his ‘big rant’ on a Premier League Zoom call and the fight against racism

“It’s going to sound bad, as if I am glamorising it, but it was normal,” Troy Deeney says when he remembers being driven around by his father in a stolen Mercedes-Benz with a drug dealer locked up in the boot. Deeney was just 19 years old and he had played one of his earliest games of professional football for Walsall against Northampton Town. He was a dozen years away from becoming the Premier League football captain who would do so much to force debate around how leading clubs in England could confront enduring racism.

Early in 2009, however, Deeney was simply puzzled by another outbreak of chaos in his life. Hearing the hammering and screaming in the boot of the car he turned to his father when they stopped for petrol. “Can you hear that noise, Dad?” he asked.

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‘I didn’t really watch any tennis’: how Martin Parr captured the Grand Slam’s real champions

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The photographer toured the four tournaments shooting thrilled fans instead of sweaty stars. He talks about why street photography is becoming impossible – and life after his cancer diagnosis

It’s the morning after the night before at the US Open and the sports sections contain images of triumph and defeat. Ecstatic Emma Raducanu lying prostrate on the tennis court. Bereft Novak Djokovic sobbing into his towel. The photographer Martin Parr would have liked to have watched the finals, but he’s been unwell and incapacitated, stuck on one floor of his house with the TV on the other. He briefly considered watching on his laptop but it just seemed too much bother. “I like tennis tournaments,” he says, a little sheepishly. “That doesn’t necessarily mean that I like tennis per se.”

In this, one suspects, he is not alone. Parr’s new book Match Point offers a vivid globe-hopping tour of the four grand slam tournaments, bounding from Melbourne to Paris to London to New York and mingling with the spectators as they ogle their iPhones or sunbathe on the grass or guzzle iced coffee at the refreshment stand (the book was commissioned by the Italian coffee firm Lavazza). Most people, he points out, visit Wimbledon in the same spirit that they would attend Ascot or the Chelsea flower show: it’s a social event, an excuse to dress up. They might spend the entire day in the grounds at SW19 and go home without seeing a single ball being served.

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Fide sparks anger with ‘gross’ breast enlargement sponsor for women’s chess

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  • Chess governing body derided for ‘misogynistic’ deal
  • However, record deal welcomed by others in the game

For a sport that has struggled to attract female players, the news that chess has just agreed the biggest ever sponsorship deal for the women’s game would usually be universally welcomed.

But the decision of chess’s governing body, Fide, to partner with the breast enlargement company Motiva is facing growing criticism from some female players, who have called the decision “gross” and “misogynistic”.

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Simone Biles says she should have quit a long time before Tokyo 2020

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  • Biles says trauma of Larry Nassar abuse was ‘too much’
  • Four-time Olympic champion pulled out of five finals in Japan

Simone Biles has admitted that she should have walked away from the Olympic programme “way before” the Tokyo Games.

Biles withdrew from five of her six finals at the Olympics in July to focus on her mental health after suffering from a phenomenon known as the twisties that affected her spatial awareness when competing.

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UK urged to resettle fleeing Afghan women’s football team

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Leeds United have offered support but players face return to Taliban regime unless accepted soon

The UK government is being asked to urgently resettle female players from Afghanistan’s junior football team who fled the Taliban and have been offered a new life with Leeds United.

The 35 young women – many of whom are in their teens – their families and football coaches are in Lahore, Pakistan, on 30-day visas. But the 136-strong group face returning to Afghanistan unless they are accepted by a third country soon – they have to leave Pakistan by 12 October.

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‘Anything I do, I want to be the best’: Usain Bolt

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Can the fastest man on the planet become a chart-topping reggae star?

Hang on,” I can’t help thinking as I wait for Usain Bolt – the Usain Bolt, Fastest Man In The World Usain Bolt – to magically appear on the laptop screen in my kitchen. Bolt has released a reggae album with his childhood friend and manager Nugent “NJ” Walker, and I’ve been granted an interview. Except… has there been some terrible mix-up? Am I interviewing some other Usain Bolt, some lesser-known reggae artist who just happens to share his name? Why on earth would a man widely considered to be the greatest sprinter of all time, a three-time world record holder, be releasing a reggae record?

But, nope, there he is, beaming at me from a nondescript kitchen somewhere in the world. (He’s actually in the UK, ready to play for the World XI against an England XI at Soccer Aid at Manchester City’s Etihad Stadium; days later, a clip will circulate of the long-retired Liverpool and England footballer Jamie Carragher beating him in a foot-race for a through ball.) He’s got the Bolt brand logo – a black bolt of lightning inside a yellow B – on the left breast of his black T-Shirt. There’s no mistaking it.

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‘We buried our sportswear’: Afghan women fear fight is over for martial arts

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Female taekwondo and karate trainers are forced to practise in secret since the Taliban takeover and fear they may never compete again

On the morning of 15 August, when the Taliban were at the gates of Kabul, Soraya, a martial arts trainer in the Afghan capital, woke up with a sense of dread. “It was as though the sun had lost its colour,” she says. That day she taught what would be her last karate class at the gym she had started to teach women self-defence skills. “By 11am we had to say our goodbyes to our students. We didn’t know when we would see each other again,” she says.

Soraya is passionate about martial arts and its potential to transform women’s minds and bodies. “Sport has no gender; it is about good health. I haven’t read anywhere in Qur’an that prevents women from participating in sports to stay healthy,” she says.

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